Date: Monday 11 April 2016
Time: 4.15-6pm
Venue: Moorgate Auditorium, 20 Moorgate, London
Speaker: Professor Nick Bostrom

In this talk, he will discuss some of the challenges that appear if one is seeking to maximize the expected value of the long-term consequences of present actions, particularly if one’s objective function has a time-neutral altruistic component. This requires one to engage with concepts such as existential risk, future technological transformations, predictability horizons, and a number of crucial considerations.

Nick Bostrom is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University. He is the founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, a multidisciplinary research centre which enables a few exceptional mathematicians, philosophers, and scientists to think about global priorities and big questions for humanity.

Professor Bostrom has a background in physics, computational neuroscience, and mathematical logic as well as philosophy. He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (Routledge, 2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (ed., OUP, 2008), Human Enhancement (ed., OUP, 2009), and the academic book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (OUP, 2014), which became a New York Times bestseller. He is best known for his work in five areas: (i) existential risk; (ii) the simulation argument; (iii) anthropics (developing the first mathematically explicit theory of observation selection effects); (iv) impacts of future technology; and (v) implications of consequentialism for global strategy.

He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award (one person selected annually worldwide from the fields of philosophy, mathematics, the arts and other humanities, and the natural sciences). He has been listed on Foreign Policy's Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice; and he was included on Prospect magazine’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15 from all fields and the highest-ranked analytic philosopher. His writings have been translated into 24 languages. There have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works.

The One Bank Flagship Seminars are a series of presentations by high-profile speakers, drawn in the main from disciplines outside of economics and finance. The idea is that they will present their work and draw out its relevance to our ‘One Bank Research Agenda’.

Drinks and canapés will follow the seminar.

This event is free though places are limited. Entry is on a first come, first served basis and is restricted to the registered attendee.

Registration for this event has now closed. A live webcast will be available for those who are unable to attend.

For any queries about this event, please contact the One Bank Research Seminar Team (stakeholderrelations@bankofengland.co.uk).

(From Youtube)